Kohberger Family Whitewashing, Trump on Maduro Dancing, and Symphony DEI, with Glenn Greenwald, Rich Lowry, and Clarinetist James Zimmermann | Ep. 1224

27:06And he's saying, no, we're not going to put them in place. We're going to do business with the communist regime. There's evidence that there's more repression now in Venezuela because they feel like they've been attacked externally. So that rationale has gone by the wayside. And then what? We're going to take their oil. Do you know how long it's going to take to refurbish that oil infrastructure? And Megan, even if we steal their oil, and I can promise you, if we do that, obviously a lot of people in Venezuela are going to fight very hard against the United States, against that were going to be dragged into the middle of a guerrilla war, the kind that any country would fight if we say we're going to steal your oil for our benefit.

27:41But for whose benefit would that be? For the shareholders and the executives of Exxon and Chevron and these international oil conglomerates, none of that is going to flow to the benefit of the American people. So the question is, for whose benefit is all of this happening? I think Americans voted for no more regime change wars. We don't want to be governing other countries. We can barely govern our own. And they've made that repeatedly clear. I think it's one of the reasons why they voted for President Trump, because he promised not to do more regime change wars. And now suddenly, because MAGA loves it and MAGA loves everything that he does, which may be true, but MAGA is a small portion of the voting population.

28:17I think it's going to create a lot of political problems for Trump in the midterms, but much more importantly, major geopolitical problems for the United States. What we're seeing now is many conservatives who are kind of leaning into American power and openly using the term imperialism. Like, we're fine with that. You know what? We're the badass of the Western Hemisphere. We can do it. We have the military capability and might to show off in this way, which is a good deterrent for these bad guys to see, like, only we could pull this off. You know, like, good for us. You better not F with us. And, you know, if it takes messing with, like, this tin pot country, that's what I've heard people say, then then too bad who gives a shit about Venezuela is what a lot of people are kind of saying like they've effed with us for too long they were playing footsie with our enemies who cannot have a greater foothold in the western hemisphere you know Teddy Roosevelt wouldn't have allowed this Monroe wouldn't have allowed this and why should Donald J Trump allow this when he can send the delta force in there and boom Bob's your uncle Maduro's out yes his vice president is still running the country.

29:26But as Trump says, we control her because we control the oil embargo happening around Venezuela. This is not new, Megan. I mean, nobody doubts that the United States has the most powerful military on the planet. China is caught up in a lot of ways. But overall, the United States military is by far the most powerful military force on the planet. I don't know anyone literally who doubts that. We are now spending a trillion dollars a year, the first ever trillion dollar a year budget on our military. This is all going to the coffers of Boeing and Northrop Grumman and Palantir and all the rest of the military industrial complex that I thought we were supposed to be worried about and we're trying to weaken.

30:07So if you want to take the position that, hey, we're back to 2002, we're just going to go around the world bombing people, invading Stand by. That doesn't work. President Trump himself is saying, no, we're going to rebuild Venezuela. Are you going to hear me? Yeah, now I got you. Keep going. Yeah, so I was saying there's this attempt to distinguish between what this is and neoconservatism by saying, no, the neocons wanted to nation build. They actually really didn't. They just wanted to bomb and kill enemies. And that's what we were doing. And it actually redounded to our harm in so many ways.

30:39We tried this so many times throughout history. It's not like the United States has been shy about invading other countries and overthrowing regimes. We've been doing this for many, many decades. And look at what we have,$38 trillion in debt, an educational system, an healthcare system that are totally broken, massive income inequality, people who can't buy a home. And now the idea is we're just going to double down and we're going to put more and more into our military. Honestly, I don't mean to be too psychoanalytical about this, but I do think this idea that like, yeah, we're back and we're going to dominate the world.

31:08This is like a very psychological need that I think comes from weakness that a lot of people feel like they don't get to really go to war. Only a tiny fraction of our population are the people who fight in it, at least unless we have a draft again. people don't have an opportunity to really feel like they're purposeful and brave and courageous and connected to a mission and so by getting to watch our military from afar carry out successful operations people get to feel strong and powerful like you see these people walking around who don't really display any bravery or strength themselves saying like yeah this is our hemisphere weak and they're getting like this kind of vicarious strength from the bravery of others i think it's very a very damaging way to to try and feel good about yourself and the bigger problem is you can go and fight the rest of the world.

31:53The reason that big powers like England or France or Belgium or the United States stop being imperial powers is because it sucks all of your resources out of you. You're constantly slaughtering people and murdering people, trying to manage countries that you don't understand thousands of miles away using all kinds of inhumane force. People decided that it wasn't worth it anymore. That's why imperialism was renounced. And this idea that we're going to go back to it, I thought the whole point of the Trump movement was, we're going to focus our resources here at home. We're going to invest in our communities, in our people.

32:25We don't want to build up the military industrial complex. We don't want to constantly be fighting wars. And like overnight, all of that vanished. And now we're right back to this sort of like Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol model of the world that I thought the movement was about renouncing. Totally. You saw how happy Lindsey Graham was yesterday. It was like, okay. He was like, he was twitching with like ecstasy. I mean, I've never seen him smiling that much, and why wouldn't he? I don't blame him. He's getting what he wants. No, I know. It's like Trump's been surrounded by actual neocons who really love bombing things, and the policies seem to reflect that.

33:01Now, Trump does what he wants to do, but one does wonder, if you're hanging out with Lindsey Graham, whether that's a great thing as our president. Now, Trump did add to this story. I read this in the New York Times and at first I didn't believe it because there's been a lot of bullshit going on about Trump. Like the Washington Post yesterday reported that the reason he doesn't want Maria Machado to. Because she won the Nobel Prize. Yes, because she just sounded like bullshit. And now already the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have both said that that's a bunch of nonsense. So you do have to be very skeptical.

33:37But the New York Times on Sunday reported and I'm reading here Mr. Maduro's regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance in recent weeks helped persuade some of the Trump team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them and trying to call what he believed to be a bluff, according to two of the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. So the White House decided to follow through on its military threats, which sounded kind of too cute by half. But then the Times reported this this morning, just this morning. President Trump is addressing Republican lawmakers at the House GOP retreat that happened this morning at 10 a.m.

34:10In wide ranging remarks, he praised the U.S. raid in Venezuela and said that he had been annoyed at the way the ousted Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, had danced as Trump administration officials escalated their threats against him in the weeks before the raid. Here is that moment today in Sat One. They've been after this guy for years and years and years. And, you know, he's a violent guy. He gets up there and he tries to imitate my dance a little bit. But he's a violent guy and he's killed millions of people. He's tortured. They have a torture chamber in the middle of Caracas. So he mentioned the dancing.

34:57By the way, here's the dancing. In case you didn't see it, this is a video from November 22nd. Here is Maduro trying to imitate the Trump dance, which could be the reason he's in handcuffs in a New York City jail at the moment, which is mildly amusing until you really think it through and then it gets kind of disturbing. Your thoughts, Glenn? here's the thing that's bothering me megan when i was uh comparing trump's foreign policy instincts to the democrats under biden and harris and also especially harley clinton what always struck me about donald trump and i said this many times on television and other places is that when he talked about war he talked about war and prioritized the most important thing about it which is that people in large numbers die you bomb people and we talk about bombing but there's people on the ground who are now dead, innocent people.

35:52He talks about the war in Ukraine. He always is emphasizing the number of people who are died in a way that I think is very important and very healthy. And he always showed this kind of aversion to war because of that. And it is true that in his first term, he was the first president not to involve the United States in a new war in decades. That really was true about him. And I used to talk about that a lot. In this last year, though, and I started noticing this when he bombed Yemen in the first month after criticizing Biden for having bombed Yemen. And then he restarted that bombing campaign.

36:22But especially when he bombed Iran in conjunction with Israel. And he started going around talking about how he and Netanyahu were war heroes. And he kept saying Netanyahu deserves a pardon for the criminal charges that he faced because those two are war heroes. And you could see Trump really taking this sort of like pride and sense of strength. He didn't, of course, fight in the military. There was a Vietnam War that he avoided. but he started feeling like he was a war hero and he was starting to get this kind of positive feeling from ordering things bombed and from pulling things up and from showing that he was the strongest.

36:54And so in the first term, John Bolton tried to pressure him. So did Marco Rubio to do regime change in Venezuela and he was okay with it. And then he realized it was too hard and he didn't do it. And that's what led to John Bolton leaving. And now suddenly we're back to, oh yeah, look what happened. He defied me. And I went in and we got him. Like he risked the lives of soldiers and our military and potentially started a new war in Venezuela because he didn't like the fact that Maduro was dancing. And I do believe that was part of the motive because none of the rest of it makes sense in terms of what it is that we did here.

37:25The last thing I just want to say quickly, Megan, if I could, is even if a country is weaker, even if a country doesn't have the military that the United States has, people just instinctively have nationalistic pride, just like the United States does. If we get attacked or people threaten in us, we unite behind our government against them. That is what countries do. And if Venezuelans, including ones who don't like Maduro, who hate Maduro, think the United States is there to take their oil and use it for the benefit of big oil companies or Americans, of course, they're going to fight the United States and not just they, but people throughout the region.

37:58It's going to generate the kind of anti-American sentiment that we saw and still see in the Middle East because of the same behavior. There's long-term consequences to all of this, no matter how triumphalist people might be feeling right now. There's I mean, Trump is too smart to not realize that he's there is no way he's planning on just stealing the oil without giving anything to the Venezuelans. I just that he's too smart. You know, he may be talking loosely. He's definitely talking loosely to NBC and Scarborough. But, you know, as for official policy, it's got to involve more than it has to come at the enrichment of the Venezuelans or he would know what they what they would do.

38:34I mean, so far, what we've seen is reactions out of Venezuela that appear to be favorable, though some of them are old. Like you do have to be very careful about what you're seeing online. I know you've been tweeting about some of the videos that are like four years old. It's like, no, no, they were cheering about something else. But there are definitely many Venezuelans who are all over X praising President Trump. I mean, Ana Navarro on The View was praising President Trump about this. It does not seem like we went in there and decapitated a regime that was super popular. It seems like even the Venezuelans were not too in love with Maduro.

39:11Now, that doesn't necessarily make it right. I'm just saying I don't know if the analysis of like they're going to rally around their flag and their deposed leader is going to work here. OK, let me let me just address that. First of all, Democrats despise George Bush and Dick Cheney. They believed he stole the 2000 election. But the minute our country was attacked, almost everybody united behind George Bush and Dick Cheney, not for like a week or for a month, but for like two or three years, gave them license to go and attack Iraq. He had 75, 80 percent approval rating. I'll just give you a quick analogy in in Brazil, where, as you know, I live and I do reporting.

39:46A few months ago, Donald Trump announced he was going to tear up, impose tariffs on Brazil, sanctioned Brazilian leaders because he didn't want Jair Bolsonaro, the former president who Trump likes, going to prison. He doesn't like other policies that Brazil is enacting. And huge numbers of Brazilians, including ones who hate the government, who hate the current president, Lula da Silva, united and said, it's not the United States that governs our country. We govern our country. We decide how Brazilians and Brazil is governed, not the United States. There's always this unifying feeling. The problem is, is that exiles or people who left Venezuela, you know, we used to hear from like before the Iraq war, these Iraqi exiles who kept telling us, oh, they're going to be dancing in the streets.

40:24They're going to welcome you as liberators. They weren't representative of the people who are actually in Iraq who, remember, are indoctrinated with all kinds of things. Let me ask you something. Because I heard a defense on that, that I was like, that's actually not a bad defense. Talking about the vast difference culturally between Iraq and Venezuela. Talking about how you're going in the Middle East with a bunch of Muslims who are raised in ways that we cannot relate to at all. It's third world and versus Venezuelans who are largely Catholic, who may have a background that's much more similar to, you know, a lot of Latinos living in Miami.

40:59And so it's not going to be as difficult to sort of help them revamp their country and reestablish a democracy that works in the way that we want it to. And that would be favorable toward the U.S. Okay, first of all, this discourse is completely contrary to everything else we've been hearing for years from the conservative movement, which is the idea that Venezuelans and other Latin Americans, Central Americans, Latin Americans cannot come to our country and assimilate because they are primitive. They don't share our values. They can't understand liberal democracy. They can't integrate into American culture the way, say, like Europeans could, Italians could, the Irish could.

41:36It's a different race. It's a different culture. This is something that we've been hearing for a long time. now suddenly Venezuelans are very aligned with us and similar to us and are ready to adopt Jeffersonian democracy in a way that the Iraqis weren't. That's the first thing. The second thing is most of the people in these countries, in Venezuela and elsewhere, are poor people. They're not very well educated. They've been living under communism for 25 years now. They are indoctrinated to believe that the United States is evil, just like we're indoctrinated to believe that Cuba and Venezuela and communist countries are evil.

42:05They have that same level of indoctrination. They're not reading freely the media or having open debates in venezuela they don't want the united states who they view and hugo chavez was a very popular venezuelan leader before maduro used to talk about how george bush was satan the united states is the great satan these are things they've been indoctrinated with for a long time they're not gonna he was at the u.n's and i can smell the scent of sulfur in the air after george bush yeah that's what hugo chavez said when when when exactly when he followed bush so these venezuelans of miami are not representative of like venezuelans in the rural area of the country or the poor Venezuelans who live in Caracas, who are now very well armed.

42:41And I think we like to tell ourselves that other countries are grateful when we invade them, when we bomb them, when we remove their leader. And the last thing I'll say, Megan, is if China came in and arrested Trump out of the White House, you would have huge numbers of Americans celebrating. Oh, Trump was Hitler. Trump. And it doesn't really say much about either the justifiability or what most people in the country think. These are very unrepresented people we're seeing in the media. I would definitely say that, well, that would never happen. But secondly, in Trump's defense, Maduro was not the recognized leader of Venezuela.

43:13So it's not exactly the same as actually like capturing a head of state who's legitimately by any measure the running the country. He lost an election in July of 2024. He refused to cede his power and claimed falsely that he had won. I want to give you this. It's not just Venezuela. Now we're talking about possibly invading Cuba. That seemed to be what Marco Rubio was intimating. And even Trump was intimating just yesterday. We played the soundbite on yesterday's show and not just Cuba, but Columbia, where Trump said the president there better quote, watch his ass. Um, and then also Greenland is back on the table.

43:53Um, and that got very interesting over on CNN when Stephen Miller gave an interview to Jake Tapper about what's going to happen with Greenland because Trump keeps saying we have to have it. We just we have to have it. We need Greenland. He's not backing off. It's caused an international incident now. European leaders have spoken out saying we would like to remind you that it belongs to Denmark and that that's a NATO country and that there'll be no taking Greenland. But here's what Stephen Miller said to Jake Tapper, Sot7. The premier of Greenland and the premier of Denmark and other Danish officials are responding to a Twitter post from your wife, Katie Miller, herself a former Trump White House official, showing Greenland covered with an American flag, saying soon after that was posted, President Trump repeated the claim that the U.S.

44:42needs Greenland for national security reasons. The Danish prime minister responded to this in an interview earlier today, as reported by Bloomberg, quote, I believe one should take the American president seriously when he says that he wants Greenland. But I will also make it clear that if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO, and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War. Can you rule out that the U.S. is ever going to try to take Greenland by force? You're going to be in military action against Greenland.

45:14Greenland has a population of 30 ,000 people, Jake. The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The United States is the power of NATO. For the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously Greenland should be part of the United States. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland. So that's a long list. I didn't even mention Iran, where Trump said we're locked and loaded and ready to go in if they shoot any protesters over there. And the protests have been growing. And by the way, now there's reports that the Ayatollah has said he's ready to flee to Russia if need be, though these protests are not quite as extreme as ones we've seen in the past where he did no such thing.

46:00So whatever. Take Iran with an asterisk. But Greenland rhetoric is ramping up. Your thoughts? I mean, there's no coherence here. Like Colombia, where President Trump is threatening the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, is a democratically elected leader. Nobody doubts that. He just doesn't like Petro because Petro is a left-wing leader who has been criticizing Trump. So that now is justification for threatening Petro. And we're going to go to war in Colombia, possibly. We're threatening. You can't threaten all these wars in Iran, in Cuba, and not follow through. And that's going to be a lot of different wars that we're then going to be fighting.

46:33And then as far as Greenland is concerned, Stephen Miller saying, by what right does Denmark have Greenland? By what right does the United States have California? By what right does the United States have Mexico? These are century-old nations that have been defined by their borders and recognized internationally for centuries. And while it may be true that Denmark isn't going to go to war with the United States over Greenland, the entire EU, all of NATO, is going to absolutely separate from the United States if the United States steals land from an EU and a NATO member. Can I just ask you something?

47:05Is that such a bad thing? I don't know. Like, are we – like, if we get kicked out of NATO? Like, they can't kick us out. We're funding the whole thing. A lot of Americans, a lot of Republicans have been saying we should dump NATO to begin with. I don't even I think I like when President Trump was questioning the ongoing viability of NATO because it was a defensive alliance formed to protect Western Europe against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union no longer exists. So I think there's a very good reason for questioning NATO. All I'm saying is that we didn't have NATO. I mean, we might not have the Ukraine war right now.

47:36Keep going. all i'm saying megan is that while stephen miller is right in this very simplistic dismissive tone denmark is not going to go to war with the united states over greenland it's only because it can't there's going to be massive consequences in terms of having entire regions of the world hate the united states view us as this rogue nation and you can say i don't really care about that but that's what opens up china to all of this influence that's why china has so much influence because so many countries have concluded the united states is this bully that uses military force all of this has major implications.

48:06The reason why we get attacked by the Middle East, the reason that there are a lot of people who hate us in the Middle East is because this is the behavior we've been engaging in for the Middle East for decades. We've been overthrowing their governments, opposing dictatorship on them, taking their oil, telling them that they have no rights. Yes, they can't fight us in the sense that they have a military equal to ours, but there's all kinds of repercussions from that. The CIA has a term for that. It's called blowback, that if you just go around the world bullying other countries and taking things that you want, there's going to be a lot of ramifications that you have to take into consideration that are going to come back to say nothing of the cost of who's going to fight all these words that Trump is is vowing and threatening i mean i don't think trump wants to get involved in a war like i think you can see that too he doesn't want he definitely he was one of the first people to oppose the iraq war when republicans were all defending it he doesn't want a war he he's defining his foreign policies these pinpoint strikes where he gets in and he gets out and by the time you've heard that there's a war on it's over right and he says we're not at war with Venezuela, we're at war with their drug dealers and people like that, he says.

49:05But I don't, I give Trump the benefit of the doubt that he does not want anything prolonged and would do his best to stop something like that. The risks I think we're looking at here are that the other sides don't agree, right? Like we didn't want war before we got attacked on 9-11 either. Right. You can always avoid war as long as the other side just submits and does everything that you tell them to do. The problem is that very often they don't do that. And many of the worst wars have happened, not because leaders wanted wars, but because once you start threatening military conflict, you have military buildup, tensions increase, you have escalation, you have miscommunication, all these things can happen in a very unintended way.

49:43This is a very dangerous game to be playing. Like, yes, I do believe that Donald Trump doesn't want to fall into some major clagmire in war. The problem is, is that the policy that he's pursuing are very likely to lead to that. I mean, what if the Venezuelans don't submit to all of his orders? He's already said, we'll be happy to put brutes on the ground. And that now you have an escalated situation. Look at how Vietnam began. We're going to send some advisors. We don't want war in Vietnam. And within a few years, we had tons of military, tons of soldiers. And within a few years after that, there were 60 ,000 American dead soldiers.

50:15Not because anyone ever sat out and said, I want to have a decade of war in Vietnam, but because the policies we pursued led inexorably to that. I definitely don't think Trump is going to willingly walk us there. but the question is, is it out of our control? Is it potentially out? Great to see you, my friend. See you soon, Glenn. Up next, Riz Lowly. Look, 2026 does not mean reinventing the wheel. Start small, swap out the garbage snacks for something real like masa chips. It's the no effort way to eat better without the diet nonsense. Just three little ingredients, organic corn, sea salt, and grass fed beef tallow.

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51:45Joining me now are pal Rich Lowry, who is editor of National Review. NR and my buds over there are very much in favor of the action in Venezuela and dropped a very interesting podcast debating it yesterday on the editors, which I highly recommend. So, Rich, we just had Glenn Greenwald on, and I know you didn't hear Glenn's defense, but you've probably seen his remarks on Twitter, and you know Glenn, very, very much against, you know, sort of this imperialist behavior by President Trump, by the United States, worried about the unintended consequences, you know, where it will land, whether there'll be a revolt of some sort within Venezuela, a rallying around their own flag, a rejection of any American control, and certainly of any attempt to seize the oil.

52:29As Trump told Scarborough, according to Scarborough this morning, he intends to do that. We're going to, quote, keep the oil. What's your give us your best defense of why this was a good idea? Yeah. So Maduro is a terrible person, terrible leader of Venezuela, allied with all the enemies of the United States. But by the standards of when the Monroe Doctrine was really in its heyday, every aspect of this regime would have been unacceptable. The disorder is spreading in the hemisphere here in the United States via the mass migration it's caused, the criminality and the drug running, allied with our enemies.

53:07None of that would have been acceptable. So, look, I agree with what you were saying yesterday. This is pretextual, the idea that it's just a law enforcement operation. It was an act of war to topple the head of state there. But in terms of what we've seen in other interventions the U.S. has undertaken in the last 20 years, this is so minimalistic, right? This would be the equivalent of a snatch and grab against Saddam Hussein, then having a Ba 'athist general take power, and then hoping you can influence him to do what you want. So there are all sorts of ways this can go sideways. There are all sorts of risks.

53:40But the way he's done it so far is calculated to minimize those risks, I think. So for people who, you know, haven't spent their lives studying the Monroe Doctrine as like freshened up by Teddy Roosevelt, can you just give us a little background? because I did read over on NR about like the numerous interventions that we did do in South America over the years when one of our neighbors was turning out to be derelict or dirt baggy or something that we found potentially problematic to us. And certainly if we saw at the time, it was always Europe we were worried about. It wasn't China back then or Russia.

54:20If we saw them meddling, we're pretty quick to go down there and say, oh, no.

54:28Yeah, so the Minodactin is the idea that we have supremacy in the hemisphere, right? So the strategic purpose of it is to exclude European nations because they represent a significant threat to us, potentially geopolitically. And then what happens after its initial enunciation, you get the Roosevelt Corollary and the Lodge corollary, which basically kind of flip it in his head in some respects. So instead of excluding others from interviewing, intervening, we assume a right to intervene when there's disorder such that it's a threat to us or it might tempt someone else to come in and intervene.

55:08So just for the record, this is not a Trump invention. This has been around for over 150 years. This is Trump is actually just resurrecting a principle that has already been recognized by presidents long ago. Keep going. Yeah. So the Trump corollary is basically just the Roosevelt corollary or the Lodge corollary. It's not a new corollary, but he likes putting his names on things. So he has to have his name on a corollary. But this is a traditional American approach he's taken. Now, we've gotten away from it the last 30 years. The last real manifestation of this was when George H.W. Bush went into Panama.

55:44But this is – we went into Latin America on much less provocation than this. countries would just be poorly run fiscally. And we'd go in and say, OK, we're taking over your finances because we don't want you in debt to Britain or Germany because that might tempt them to come in and seize your territory or take control of your government. We don't want to see that to happen, see that happen. So in similar respects, Trump feels completely new because he's very old and represents traditions we'd gotten away from for better or worse. The Panama thing actually worked out okay. I mean, like, not all of these interventions have worked out.

56:21In fact, the vast majority of them have not worked out, like Iraq and Libya. But the Panama thing, which is probably the most analogous, did work out pretty well. And we'll see whether, you know, that's what's going to happen here. What do you make of Trump saying to Scarborough, though, that we're going to keep the oil? Again, I don't know what that means exactly. It's like a snippet. How do we keep the oil? It's not our oil. I realize they owe us some oil or at least some payments for oil they took from Exxon and back in the day. But like, what do you make of that news this morning? He's had a fixation with this, right?

56:53His critique of the Iraq war was in part, we didn't keep the oil, right? Yeah. He doubled down on that this morning to Scarborough. Yeah. So he likes the idea of gaining assets and benefiting from any transaction. So I'm not a huge fan of this in that the oil in Venezuela is for the Venezuelans. If we're going to help them develop it and have American companies there investing for the good of Venezuelans and our companies are going to benefit too, that's fine. And maybe that's ultimately what would happen. But the way he presents it, I think, is counterproductive. The same thing with running Venezuela.

57:28We're not running Venezuela, right? You have the vice president running Venezuela, and we're hoping to coercer into doing what we want. And I think we'll probably have some success with that, at least in the short or medium term. But we're not running Venezuela. And usually when you're not running a country, you don't go out of your way to say you're running the country. But Trump, again, likes his name on stuff. He likes the idea of running things. And then Marco Rubio's like, oh, no, no, no, didn't mean it like that. Just got to coerce with the oil. And then Trump's like, no, I'm running it.

57:55And then the question from the reporter was, who specifically? And Trump goes, me, me. He's like, my deputies, because they all have different areas of expertise, but ultimately, me, which I mean, you can do it. Of course, it's Marco. Marco's running everything. But look, Panama is - Okay, but what I'm speaking about, Marco. Yeah, you go ahead and finish your point. I was just gonna say, Panama is a pretty good analog, but even compared to Panama, this is more minimalist because we go in on the ground for weeks with troops in Panama. We already had an extensive troop presence there already because of the canal, obviously.

58:26And we swear in the new president after we grabbed Noriega on a US military base. So we're not doing anything of that nature in Venezuela. So it's a combination of extremely, and the word that's been used so much about it, audacious operation with a high degree of caution or trying to minimize downside risk as well. And it isn't bad to see, to show China, Iran, and Russia the capabilities of the U.S. military, because, I mean, the whole operation was, to use a technical term, extremely badass. I mean, I heard you guys talking about this on the editors, but it was really incredibly impressive. I realized people did die on the other side, but not a single U.S.

59:07service personnel. was hurt. Well, some were hurt, but no one was killed. And no leaks in the dark of night got it done. It reminded me of Abbottabad, Rich. Yeah. But I think even harder than that, because Osama bin Laden has some security, not the security that comes with being a head of state. And also, this wasn't a shock, right? Bin Laden didn't know we were coming. Maduro knew we were coming, probably, or there's a high chance that we would at some point. And still, this was so highly proficient and it does send a good message to China and other malfactors around the world now China has a big huge military taking on China would be nothing like this obviously but China hasn't done a military operation I don't know since 1979 when they lost a border war with Vietnam so they have to be highly aware of just how good and practiced we are at this yeah you don't you know it's the old um line from Braveheart that could be my head in a basket.

1:00:04Like no one wants to be on the receiving end of the Maduro treatment. What of the argument that speaking of China, this is not going to help when they invade Taiwan and we say, hey, that's an independent nation. China's a lot more closely aligned with Taiwan than we are with Venezuela. Now, granted, we didn't like swoop in and say Venezuela is officially part of the United States. It's a 51st state. So it's not totally analogous. But did we undermine our, you know, moral virtue in trying to tell them to stay out of Taiwan? Yeah, maybe there's a little something to that, but they're going after Taiwan no matter what.

1:00:41We could be the most high-minded moralistic, have the most high-minded moralistic foreign policy imaginable, you know, Woodrow Wilson on steroids and China still going after Taiwan. I do think there's a moral difference here, right? I think a sovereign people have the right to govern themselves. But Venezuelans weren't covering themselves because this guy stole an election and was a dictator. And now perhaps we'll get a new election. They'll actually actually have a chance to govern themselves. But where I think you'd get more into an analogy that might serve as a bit more of a permission slip to China would be if we went and annexed Greenland, which I don't think we're going to do and I hope we're not going to do.

1:01:25But they're talking about unclear, unclear. But I heard you guys bet whether we will. Most of the editors thought the chance at the end of first terms of us having an ex to Greenland was in the 10 % range. Rich Lowry put it at a 40 % chance. I have to say, I'm with you. Like he's really focused on it. And what we're learning about Trump is he's actually not saying things he doesn't mean when it comes to these, again, to use the word audacious plans around some of our neighbors. Yeah, he doesn't do everything he says, but everything he does do, he says openly beforehand. And I just think if you really wanted to force the issue and said, look, the 82nd Airborne is ready to go, are you going to cut a deal with me or not?

1:02:11He'd get the deal. Now, I hope he doesn't do that. I think we could get everything we want out of Greenland without going to any extreme measures. It has a lot of critical minerals. If we want to go mine them, it was controlled by a NATO country. You think NATO would be in favor of that and we could cut a deal to do that. But I would just urge the Danish prime minister, if she's an MK listener, go have a dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Don't clap back at him in social media. Go and try to win him over and persuade him in private. Well, and this is another method that Trump has used effectively where he says, I want a 10.

1:02:46I expect a 10. Give me a 10 or else. And the whole game is about winding up with a five or a six. So we'll see. We'll see on Greenland. I, too, do not think we're invading Greenland. He talked about seizing the canal, right? And the Panamanians said, OK, no, we're actually we'll kick the Chinese out. We'll give you a better deal on fees. And he hasn't talked about it since. So the Danes should be thinking about that model, I think. Yes. OK. Also, I just like our chances in general against the Danes. I've said, um, let's talk about Donnie. What a mess. So he, not only did he get inaugurated, whatever sworn in and said the nonsense about, we're going to enjoy the warmth of collectivism instead of the, the frigidity of, of individual rugged behavior or rugged individualism.

1:03:35Um, now And he, it turns out, he's got a director of the office to protect tenants. And New York is all about the landlord-tenant situation. I mean, the high-rise buildings are filled with people leasing their apartments. Rich people, poor people, middle-class people. It's the dominant thing in New York. and he has an office to protect tenants, which sounds good because as between a tenant and a landlord, most people think of themselves as the renter and you think, yeah, protect the tenants. Unfortunately, he's hired a lunatic. Her name is Sia Weaver and I'll get the name of the wonderful woman online who tracked Sia Weaver's accounts before she started deleting them all.

1:04:24And this woman did a great job. Michelle Tandler is her name, who pulled the screenshots of some of her most egregious posts. Like, okay, I'm just going to read a couple. There's no such thing as a good gentrifier, meaning people who move into like poorer neighborhoods and have a little bit more affluence and are responsible for raising the property values and bringing nicer businesses in. Only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and those who aren't. Here's another one. Rent control and public housing for everyone. Massive government interventions to solve gentrification.

1:05:02Here's another one. She writes, I agree with you unless you're talking about rent control. Rent control is a perfect solution to everything. She goes on to write, I think pass really strong rent control is a more effective way to shrink the value of real estate than reducing rezoning applications. So what she wants is to shrink the value of real estate. And she thinks the best way to do it is to pass really strong rent control. Then we get to the racial stuff. This country built wealth for white people through genocide, slavery, stolen land and labor. White supremacy built the North and the South.

1:05:37Then she goes on to say, endorse, she endorses, endorse a no more white men in office platform. And then she adds, and no more reality TV stores for that matter. Obviously reference to Trump in 17. And then she writes, impoverish the white middle class. Home ownership is racist. Failed public policy. Impoverish the white middle class is the stated goal of our new tenant czar in New York, Rich, which tells me it's just as bad, if not worse, than we expected. Your thoughts on Sia, the new tenant czar? Yeah, it's just it's comically bad. Now, the ultimate problem is not her. It's Mom Downey. And these are Mom Downey's views as well, although he's a good politician.

1:06:23So he did as much as he possibly could to obscure them prior to the election. But private property is not just the core individual right. It undergirds every liberty in Western civilization. and rent control, wherever it's been tried, has been an abject failure, including in New York. You know, the famous phrase, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning, which is supposedly said during a World Series broadcast in New York in 1977. It wasn't actually said, but there was a huge fire visible from the stadium and so notable that the broadcasters talked about it because all these buildings were burning because they were dilapidated or the owners didn't want them anymore because they weren't making any money off of them, and they couldn't possibly make money off of them.

1:07:09So they didn't invest in them and didn't have any incentive to keep them up. So what you do when you rent control a bunch of apartments, you ensure that their stock, their value goes steadily down. And then meanwhile, everyone else who's not in a rent control department has to pay even more because you constricted the supply. So it's just been an abject failure everywhere. So on top of just these hideous, immoral views she has, she knows nothing about economics and nothing about the history of her own city. Here's a little more on camera this time from Sia Weaver in Sotnang. democratically controlled public housing is really important and that's why when Raquel was talking about the communities and that she's describing um that you know that's a self as a created community where the people who are living there are like setting the agenda and and so you know people like home ownership because they like control and that's been perverted by like deep racism and deep classism in our society so like we have to not have a racist and class of society.

1:08:15And so that's like something we need to think about like deeply. But, you know, we, it's about, to me, it's about control and why rent control is really important is because rent control alters the dynamic, the power dynamic between renters and who, who owns the building. We have to think deeply about the deep racism and classism behind behind homeownership, Rich. That's our assignment from Sia Weaver. You know what she reminds me of? This is what people say is being done to South African farmers, right? You get a government that is racist against white people and seeks to oppress them in order to supposedly make up for past injustices.

1:09:02Wait, can I just say, sorry to interrupt you, but literally in his acceptance speech, Mamdami said South Africa is our model. There you go. Yeah, I missed that. But homeownership is a universal aspiration, and it's good for everyone. And you want more people to be homeowners, not to punish people who happen to have enough resources to own homes. And to really reduce the value of housing and to make rents lower and the price of houses lower, you need a greater supply. So you need to encourage developers and landlords to build and invest more. And this is the exact opposite approach. So not only does she think that housing is racist, she actually thinks that white New Yorkers are going to have to have a different relationship with property.

1:09:54Sia doesn't think you should really have your apartment under the terms that you and your mortgage broker or the seller negotiated. Here she is in the clip that made a lot of people unhappy when it hit yesterday, Sade. I think the reality is that for centuries, we've really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.

1:10:48What does that mean? A different relationship to property. Does that mean your property is being taken from you or you can no longer own it? And I don't know anyone whether they own the smallest little postage stamp property or the biggest mansion in the country. Everyone is proud of their property. Everyone's highly invested in it. No one wants anyone to take a step on it without their permission. This is a fundamental part of human nature, and that's why systems based on this worldview always and inevitably fail. Yeah. So Harmeet Dillon, who's running the civil division at the Department of Justice, she saw that and tweeted out, reminder, hey, FYI, we're watching you and it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in housing policy.

1:11:35Sorry, but you're going to get sued if you try this shit. Thank God for Harmeet. She's truly like one of the MVPs of the Trump administration. And she does it quietly without fanfare, but she's a badass. Um, speaking of DOJ policy, let's move to Minnesota for a moment where the Department of Homeland Security is now conducting raids. I think that's the right word, but a full scale investigation unleashing some 2000 agents all over Minneapolis in the wake of Nick Shirley's independent journalist explosive report that hit on December 26th and some of the reporting that came before of it. Before that, here's one video of DHS that they posted showing Homeland Security investigations in Minneapolis.

1:12:23They're going from business to business. Then Kristi Noem's convoy was in the news as well in Minneapolis, checking out some of these areas that were unearthed by Nick Shirley as allegedly having daycare centers with no children. And it does seem this is smart to me, Rich, because, A, we need to crack down on these people. But B, it's good politics because Trump doesn't want the narrative to be all of his attention is in Venezuela when we've got real problems here. And he is proving you can walk and chew gum at the same time. Yeah, so these rays are fine. Maybe they're even helpful. I do think they're there in large part for show.

1:13:06And I think the real action here. Let me back up. I think the viral content we've seen from the City Journal and Nick Shirley, very helpful. You don't blow Tim Walz out of the water without him. But I do think they've created a misimpression that this scandal just broke three weeks ago, when actually it's been an ongoing thing for years. And the federal prosecutors have been heroes there in exposing this and nailing some of the malfactors to the wall. So the most important thing, I think, get them more resources. I think they had maybe five people in this office led by this guy named Joe Thompson, who's been a total hero.

1:13:40Give him a couple more fantastic top of the line prosecutors and some more investigators and let him keep going at this. I think I think that's where the rubber really meets the road because the exposure is fantastic. But you need to nail every single one of these people to the wall. Well, one of the infuriating things about this, I tweeted out after the Nick Shirley piece broke. Where was the Minneapolis Star Tribune in breaking this story? Because they've written countless stories defending Tim Walsh's insane trans policies on children. They're very focused on defending tampons in the boys' bathroom, but not so much on unearthing the Somali fraud.

1:14:17And it's come out that part of the reason is they're worried about being called racists. The Democratic lawmakers didn't want to be called racist. I'm sure it applies at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, too. And their defenders were responding to my tweet by showing articles in which the Minneapolis Star Tribune covered the Fed's criminal prosecutions of some of the Somali fraudsters. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about actual investigative journalism where you, as the reporter, unearth the fraud, where your reporting drags the government to the problem, kicking and screaming or willingly.

1:14:56That's what actual investigative journalism looks like. Not, OK, now the feds have actually gotten a bunch of convictions of 80 Somalis. I guess we're going to have to cover this. Instead, what we saw the media do, Rich, in the wake of Nick Shirley's report and City Journal and Walter Kern, Walter Kernkite, as he called himself on our show yesterday, County Highway, that reporting is to shit all over the reporting. You know, we pulled a couple of these of the headlines. This is courtesy of Drew Holden, who we follow on X, and he does a great job of sort of collating things. The New York Times, who seemed positively incensed, he writes accurately, that this video from Nick Shirley caught fire, accusing him of being, quote, in search of politically charged footage while burying whether there were any actual kids at these child care centers in the first place.

1:15:47He mentions next the AP saying this was perhaps the most awful defense of the child care centers. The AP relying on the head of the now famous and allegedly closed ABC Learning Center that didn't have the N to suggest that this criticism is, quote, a political campaign against Somali Minnesotans. OK, it was a campaign against the poor Somalis. I could be here with you all day going through them. CNN, we covered yesterday, as well as CBS. That's where their focus has been. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Journalists should be seeking to advance the story. Instead, they focus very often on attacking the guy who advanced the story, right?

1:16:29So the story was Nick Shirley. The story wasn't the underlying scandal. CNN sent someone to confront Nick Shirley. And then they only covered the story in that they were trying to debunk Nick Shirley. And he got some things wrong. But he also, it was so compelling because it's just so shocking to the conscience to show up, to see him show up at this place when a scandal has been going for years and they're still operating and getting millions of dollars from the state and there's no one there. It's obviously a bogus story. Go and do that yourself rather than attacking the guy, you know, the YouTuber who had the gumption to do it on his own with a local guide.

1:17:05So part of the reason I mentioned is they're all worried about being called a racist because the fraud appears to be committed by a bunch of Somalis. Their lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, is an idiot. And here she was on December 26th in Minnesota reacting to some of these reports. His report hit on December 26th. Look at her. Stop 25. Salaam alaikum. My name is Peggy Flanagan. I am the lieutenant governor of Minnesota. And I'm really honored and humbled to be here with all of you today. I am incredibly clear that the Somali community is part of the fabric of the state of Minnesota. She's in a hijab.

1:17:55Yeah. I mean, if these people were on the up and up, they would have said Nick Shirley, thank you. You know, you've uncovered some fraud. That is terrible and shouldn't have happened. thank you for doing it. If you can find more, great, you know, and we'll go right behind you. We'll see whether they're appropriate or not. And we'll cut them off and we'll prosecute them. Right. That's that would be the up and up response. But instead, they've been desperate to cover for the scandal and minimize it from the beginning. The accusations of racism clearly, even though various bureaucrats in Minnesota thought something was desperately wrong, clearly helped convince them to let it go.

1:18:33And they're still in that mode. Look at her, Rich. She's got her big, black, liberal glasses on, like the Rachel Maddow huge glasses that all the libs wind up wearing from Mark Cuban to Olbermann to Rachel Maddow. She's got her coded glasses on. I'm a liberal. I'm a progressive. And her hijab. I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to wear that if you're not actually Muslim. So Peggy, I think you've culturally appropriated. She looks like idiot. And this is why the Minnesota taxpayers have paid who got God knows how many millions in fraudulent dollars to this community. Good luck. I believe in the feds, but I do not believe in any Minnesota law enforcement.

1:19:15And Tim Walz has now ended his political career as a result of all this. So farewell to him. Now, in a not totally unrelated story, it hit the news late yesterday that ICE agents who were booking their trip to Minnesota to go check out some of these businesses were rejected. They made the reservations at this Minnesota Hilton. And then the Hilton front desk, whatever, the people managing the reservations, but, you know, site at the local site, it wasn't like on the 1-800 number for Hilton, called them back and said, we're canceling all of your reservations. We're not having ICE people here. It's in writing.

1:19:57It's, it's, you can people take a, take a look at it themselves. Um, but they made clear they didn't want them there. And now, hold on, I'm trying to find it. Okay. Now this is all broken by Nick Sorter. I should say a journalist on X, another independent journalist who went to the minute, the Minneapolis is the mil, the Minnesota Hilton. Okay. So the controversy hit DHS called attention to it saying, what kind of BS is this? And then the Hilton chain apologized for banning DHS agents. They didn't deny that it happened. And they issued a statement claiming that they'd been in touch with DHS to accommodate the impacted agents and that they do not discriminate against any individuals or agencies.

1:20:46But now Nick Sorter breaks that there was no such attempt to reach DHS or to make it right, citing Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, and says even the front desk manager says that he had spoken with the owner shortly before Nick Sorter walked in. Again, this is Nick Sorter, not to be confused with Nick Shirley, around 10.50 p.m. and confirmed that the anti-ICE policy remained in effect. Here is Nick Sorter going to the Hilton, Sot 27. Do you have any rooms for tonight? uh we should yeah okay uh like how many could we get like 10 10 i mean yeah i know it could be what agency is it for uh using the government would be a department of homeland security uh so we're not accepting people from immigration eyes agents dhs into our property it's just the management ownership.

1:21:46Okay, I thought that changed today. I just talked to my, the owner of the building, and he didn't say there has been any changes. They lied. Hilton and the Hampton Inn out here in Ever Peak Hospitality lied. Full of shit. They almost got a little bit of a pass the first time, right? You thought they may have learned their lesson. And this is why I said that their talk is it means nothing. You know, people were saying, oh, well, no, they said that they're going to change their policy. They lied. They didn't do it. They didn't do it. So they're now going to get Bud Lighted. Congratulations, Hilton.

1:22:30Yeah, the name of the property was Hampton Inn, which is owned by Hilton. But it's this particular outlet is owned by a group called Everpeak that was used to purchase this hotel. It's owned by four partners, Parmeet Singh, Amanpreet, Hyundai, Karandeep, Nagra, and Mohinderjeet Kaur, according to public records filed last June with the Minnesota Secretary of State. Now, Hilton Corporate has responded to Nick's video saying, hold on a second, teeny tiny type, saying, Rich, the independent hotel owner had assured us that they'd fixed the problem and published a message confirming this. A recent video clearly raises concerns that they're not meeting our standards and values.

1:23:15As such, we are taking immediate action to remove this hotel from our systems. Hilton is and has always been a welcoming place for all. We're also engaging with all of our franchisees to reinforce the standards we hold them to across our system to help ensure that this does not happen again. So hurrah, because ultimately, sounds like Hilton is doing the right thing. This particular hotel was humiliated. And the Nick Shirley video on the daycares in Minneapolis, I think, has unleashed an inspo amongst many independent journalists like Nick Sorter, Rich, to go out and just do what the Minneapolis Star Tribune will not.

1:23:55Yeah. So first of all, if you're Hilton, you think you'd just be glad that anyone wants to come to Minnesota in January, right? You think you'd welcome any booking. But clearly, this is an out-of-control franchisee who's trashing the brand of the entire business. The Bud Light reference from Nick there is well taken, and the Hilton brass apparently is aware of it or actually just doesn't hate federal law enforcement. So hats off to them to doing the right thing. But you're right. I think the Nick Shirley example is empowering and catalyzing a lot of this. And I think we'll see more of it in other states because we need to kick the tires of every single welfare state program in every state in America.

1:24:36And if mainstream so-called legacy outlets aren't going to do that, I think we're going to have independent guerrilla journalists doing it. It's a very good thing. It's great. It's great. Even if there are errors in the initial reporting, like what Nick Shirley did, which was seen over 150 million times, his video, which is 43 minutes long. It's a value because it insisted that other reporters get there. It insisted that the feds get there. It made it impossible to ignore. And that was a deep, deep public service. Rich Lowry, as are you. Thank you, sir. Great to see you. Thanks for being here.

1:25:10Happy New Year. Talk soon. You too. All right, coming up, I mean, I've never said this before, a clarinetist with a story you have to hear. Do not go away. The new year hits and suddenly you might want new everything, including a new wardrobe. Does that resonate, ladies? Well, our sponsor, Daily Look, makes that wardrobe upgrade way too easy. Daily Look is the number one rated premium personal styling service for women. With Daily Look, you get your own dedicated personal stylist to curate a box of clothes based on your body shape, preferences, and lifestyle. This is not an algorithm. This is a real personal stylist.

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1:26:26My next guest is making major headlines right now after filing a lawsuit against the Knoxville Symphony in Tennessee, claiming that despite winning a blind audition in which they cannot see who is trying out, they can only hear the music being played, they refused then to hire him once they realized who he was over his past opposition to DEI policies at a different orchestra. A blind audition is when a musician plays for a panel of judges behind a curtain to prevent any bias in the selection. It's supposed to mean that someone will get the spot strictly based on merit. James Zimmerman started playing the clarinet in 1991 and then professionally in 1997.

1:27:09For over 12 years, James was the principal clarinet of the Nashville Symphony. He played principal clarinet for the Nashville Symphony. His work has been featured in commercials and video game soundtracks and movies. He also happened to perform at President Barack Obama's second presidential inauguration. Here's a sample of James's talent.

1:27:55It was beautiful. Reminds me of myself back in 1980 when I was first chair at the Bethlehem Central Elementary School. Nailed it. My one advantage was my earlier school where I'd gone in Syracuse allowed the clarinet, allowed you to join band in fourth grade. So I came and I was ahead of everybody else who had never played before. And that's how I became first chair, which lasted for exactly a year until the others got up. Just, I mean, it's like looking in a mirror, really. Okay. Back to James. He says his career started to unravel in 2019 as he began to oppose DEI measures at the Nashville Symphony, which were becoming more and more common in the music world.

1:28:35His story is complicated. He didn't just oppose a DEI initiative and call it a day. It happened over months. And at one point, he admits it nearly drove him mad, as DEI policies can do. James is here now to explain his story, his lawsuit that he's just filed, and why the Trump administration may be getting involved next. James, welcome to the show. Hey, Megan, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great to see you and congrats on achieving so much and on your natural talent. It was very impressive to listen to. So let's start back. So what happened was, I guess we'll start with the current controversy.

1:29:12You go to the Knoxville blind audition and you're a hell of a clarinet player and you're behind the curtain. They can't see that it's you and you are the best, right? That, like, they told you it's yours. Like, before they actually had, like, revoked it or done any investigation on you, they were like, you were the winner. You're the best. That's right. So the blind audition was a two-day-long process that started on a Monday morning. They listened to people one after another all day long. And they keep whittling it down like a sports tryout. And after the first day, they asked me to come back the second day.

1:29:48I passed another round the morning of Tuesday, the 16th of September. They put me into the finals that afternoon. And after the final round, they declared me the winner, came to my dressing room and said, we'd love to have you on the payroll in two weeks. We'll call you tomorrow. And I guess instead of calling me the next day, they dug into my sordid history and found enough reasons not to hire me. And Rachel Ford, their CEO, called me and said, thanks, but no thanks. And we're not going to talk to you about any of this. So good luck to you. Yeah. And it was clearly based on your experience with the Nashville Symphony back in 2019.

1:30:24That's right. That's what the email says. It says a number of items have come to our attention regarding your employment in the Nashville Symphony, which there are some stinkers in there, but there's a lot of advocacy that I did on behalf of my Black colleagues and for the process of blind auditions. So like you said, it's complicated, but people love to zero in on your worst moments in times like this. But what the 2019 incident at the Nashville Symphony seems to boil down to is, you tell me if I've got it right, you stood up for a black oboe player who was potentially about to get the shaft.

1:31:06You stood up for him. Then the person running that symphony kind of overcompensated and started bending over backwards for this black oboe player. You started getting the short end of this relationship. And ultimately you and he, when you clashed, they took his side. They didn't recognize any of his bad behavior toward you. but when you finally started to like get back in his face, they shamed you for being the problem and you got booted. Is that basically it? That is exactly accurate, Megan. What happened was there was a botched blind audition for a black oboist who had been playing on a temporary basis in the orchestra.

1:31:49Sometimes when an orchestra needs to fill a gap and doesn't have time to host a national blind audition, they will just appoint someone on a temporary basis. So this oboist was hired without an audition based on his qualifications. He was a pretty good player, but not necessarily up to the standards of everyone else. But I took him under my wing, became his friend. I coached him for free leading up to the national blind audition that he had to win to become our permanent principal oboist. And I said to him what none of his friends had ever dared to say, which is, look, man, it's not so much this racism you're talking about all around you.

1:32:27It's the fact that you're paranoid and you are not taking accountability for your shortcomings, but I believe in you and I believe you can win this thing and I'm gunning for you. I got your back. And the best possible outcome here is that you win and we have the first principal oboist of color in the United States in a major orchestra. And that's what was about to happen in his blind audition. He was the last man standing after days of difficult competition, but accidentally we found out it was him during deliberations. And our conductor and the rest of my colleagues who are on this blind audition panel said, oh, I don't want to play with this guy.

1:33:04What do we do? And the conductor says, all right, we're going to declare this a no-win situation. We're going to send him home, and we're never going to speak of this again. And I said, over my dead career, can you do that? So, I took a stand against the conductor and all of my colleagues and said, we are going to march back into the conductor's office and tell him how despicable that decision was. And we're going to give this black oboist a chance to prove himself. And we did that. He crumbled. The orchestra management hired him unilaterally with no vote of his colleagues. So he can now never say that he was hired based on our qualifications, our vote.

1:33:41He was stamped a DEI hire forever. And when I protested, he made up a Jussie Smollett-like narrative about me that I was a stalker and a racist and a nasty person and a white supremacist. Let me stop you there. What did you want to have happen? What, cause when we'll like, I'm with you on the story, you're advocating for him. Then they tried to stop him from getting the job, even though it was a blind audition, cause they found out it was him. And you were like, that's not cool. That's, that's not okay. But then what did they do? They, then they gave him something more than you wanted them to give him.

1:34:12What, what was it that upset you on the permanent hire? Well, then they gave him another probationary year so he could prove himself and prove that he was going to get tenure. That's maybe a piece of the detail that you were missing. After a player wins a blind audition, they're typically given a one-year probationary contract where the player is evaluated on whether or not they're a good fit. Because a blind audition doesn't tell you everything about somebody. It doesn't tell you what their personality is, what kind of a colleague they are, if they show up on time, if they're a good listener, if they take correction easily.

1:34:45this black oboe player was very bad at all of those things. So what do you do? We either hire the guy or we kick him to the curb and he sues the orchestra for racial discrimination for trying to fire him illegally. A suit that in 2019, he absolutely would have won. We all would have gotten crushed. So the management of the orchestra says, well, we can just fire this one player and pin the whole thing on him. And that's what they did to me. And I knew they were going to do it. My only recourse was public opinion, and I thought if I played the long game— Wait, wait, let me stop you again because I still got—I got confused again.

1:35:21So they're at the point where they have to decide whether they're going to give them the permanent offer after the one year of probation. And what did they want to do, and what did you want to do? Well, they wanted to hire him no matter what because they wanted to avoid litigation. So they didn't really want him. They just wanted to avoid litigation. Correct. Okay, and what were you saying? this, but we all know this. And I'm the only person saying it out loud. And everyone's trying to say, he's doing a great job. He's a great player. And I'm thinking, that's an insult to our audience. Everybody can hear that this guy's all over the place.

1:35:57And everybody is tired of the struggle sessions that he's putting us through, all of his extra social media that he does, declaring that orchestras are racist. Nobody wants to hear that. We just want to come to work. We want to play with the best players and leave. It's a simple job. It's a fun job. And his presence and his advocacy sucked all the fun out of it for everybody. This is not a job you're going to get rich doing. Can you just explain, too, because I didn't know this, James, but apparently, like, principal oboist is a rather important role in an orchestra. It's the most important role in an orchestra.

1:36:32When you go to an orchestra and it gets quiet when the lights go down and we all tune up to that one note, that's the oboist giving that note. The oboist gives all the best solos, all the most beautiful solos in the repertoire by Brahms and Beethoven and Debussy are all given to the first oboe. It's an amazing instrument, and it can have more artistic influence on the sound of the group than any other instrument. So this was not some job where the guy could be covered for by everybody else around him. He was setting the tone quite literally for what we were doing. So you fought to get this guy a fair audition and a fair chance at the orchestra, but having worked with him as a fellow musician for a year, it was clear to you he didn't deserve the job, he wasn't up to snuff, and that the only reason the orchestra was not about to acknowledge that publicly and let him go as they would have, in your view, a white man was because of the color of his skin, which you also objected to.

1:37:28All of this sounds like principled behavior on your part. And when you raised that objection, they fired you? That's right. I mean, I believed in him. I thought he was very talented, which he was. He has great natural ability. And let's not take away his achievement of winning a blind audition against a national pool of candidates from all over the place. This is a major position. Principal clarinet of the Nashville Symphony. This is music city. And a position like that can lead to jobs in academia, in recording studios. This is no small potatoes. This is not a hobby. This is not something that people do outside of their regular job for fun.

1:38:01This is a career. The stakes were high, and I thought this guy had enough talent, but he was just broken-brained. You know how some of these wokesters get. They can't think. They don't see reality for what it is. They start seeing racism in everything, every interaction. And so I was thinking, maybe we can disabuse him of these horrible notions of what's going on around him and convince him to just tone it down and do your playing. But he was not able to be convinced that the world was anything other than what he said it was. So I thought, well, we got to kick this guy to the curb. Nobody wants to work with this.

1:38:37Forget it. He had his chance. So other players were complaining about that behavior? Oh yeah. In our meetings that were leading up to the decision about whether he should get tenure or not, he had no support whatsoever from any musician. The conductor didn't like him. None of us liked him, but management liked him. The CEO liked him because he was his golden child, his DEI ticket to success. He's like, look, we're going to parade this guy around everywhere and show everybody how righteous we are. He's a human virtue signal, which by the way, is quite racist to tokenize somebody and do this, parade them around for their skin color.

1:39:11And I objected to all of this. The respectful thing to do to any musician, black, white, or other, is to treat them just the same way you would as if they were a member of the majority group. Like that's the respectful thing. That's like me not going after a black journalist who says something completely inane because she's black. I would never do my fellow journalists that disservice. I'll criticize you no matter what your skin color is, which is a sign of respect. Stand by, there's much more to this story. We'll pick it up on the back end of this. Quick break first, James, don't go away. A new year means new financial goals, like making sure your savings are secure and diversified.

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1:40:24Consider making right now your first time to buy gold and take advantage of a rebate up to$10 ,000 when you buy before January 30th. Text MK to the number 989898. Claim your eligibility today. Again, text MK to 989898. Hey, everyone. It's me, Megan Kelly. I've got some exciting news. I now have my very own channel on Sirius XM. It's called the Megyn Kelly Channel, and it is where you will hear the truth, unfiltered, with no agenda, and no apologies. Along with the Megyn Kelly Show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Jashinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.

1:41:05It's bold, no BS news, only on the Megyn Kelly Channel, Sirius XM 111, and on the Sirius XM path.

1:41:16Here with me today is James Zimmerman, a storied clarinetist who is now involved in a DEI-related lawsuit. When last we left off, James had explained to us how he had helped a black oboist get a fair shot at making the Nashville Symphony, despite the fact that the conductor of the orchestra, upon learning who was the oboist trying out, said, I don't want him. And James said, that's not going to fly. You're going to have to give him a shot. He got this black oboist his shot, which led to a one year trial period. And at the end of the year, James says those who are in the orchestra and pretty much everyone other than the brass, meaning the corporate brass, not the actual brass in the symphony, wanted this guy gone, that he wasn't pulling his weight, that he was annoying talking about DEI issues all the time, and that he wasn't particularly talented as an oboist, which is a very important thing.

1:42:10important role in an orchestra. But this guy was not going to be criticized by James without a fight. And the people running the orchestra did not want to fire their one black oboist. So things started to get ugly. And now all of this is being used against James, James says, by the orchestra in Knoxville, for which he just tried out and made it. He was the best in the blind audition. But then they said, we're not going to hire you, alleges James, because we took a look at what happened to you at Nashville. That's why we're deep now in what happened at Nashville. And all this to me is, is just my opinion is utter bullshit.

1:42:48What happened to you, James? I can see exactly what the motivations were. They were pissed that you wouldn't just go along so that they could look like virtuous people with the black oboist. And they didn't like you objecting to him mouthing off about how white supremacy was everywhere, which was an inconvenient thing to, to object to back in 2020 and 2019. And they were, but they were fine besmirching you. Now you admit you wrote one weird email that they used against you or whatever, however you want to use the, whatever word you want to use for it, but things got contentious. And this is the one thing that they've been able to like hold against you.

1:43:25And even when I said you were coming on today, people online were like, well, ask him about his email in which he referenced a gun. Okay. We'll get there. So we're setting, we're going to get there in one second. Let's just set it up for the audience. So I'm reading here from the Free Beacon Report that broke your story back in 2020. And it says as follows, okay, tensions in the symphony were rising and the oboist lodged a human resources complaint against you. It described an incident that had taken place over a month before the oboist's botched audition. Now, after the botched audition, you went to bat for the oboist, but here he is saying, oh, you're some sort of a racist because an incident that happened before the audition, in which they claim you asked him whether it would be okay if you, a white man, used the N-word in your rendition of a rap song.

1:44:14The oboist said, sure, but you, James Zimmerman, nonetheless apologized after singing the slur, quote, the N-word did not feel good, James recalls telling Underwood. And now at this point in the story, the oboist is trying to use that against you. Do you recall that where suddenly he brought up an old incident that seems to have been long under the bridge to try to paint you as a racist? Yeah, I mean, that was stupid of me. We were both hip hop fans. He's the only other orchestral musician I've ever met that grew up listening to people like Snoop Dogg and the Notorious B.I.G. He knew I liked them.

1:44:50He knew I had at a party a couple days before that had like wrapped along with some biggie and he was like I wish I'd been there to hear that and I had told him dude I'm not going to say the n-word in front of you but then we were just like listening to some music after concert one night and I was I said yeah remember when you said you wanted to hear that let's go wrap it in my car and he's like yeah sure say the n-word it's no big deal and I was like this is it was so stupid but I handed him the golden dagger and three weeks later after he won the blind audition and I stuck up for him, he stabbed me right in the back with it because he was so desperate to find some sign of racism and distract from the fact that after two years of playing with us and winning a blind audition, we still tried to get rid of him.

1:45:34I mean, have some sympathy for the guy. How humiliating is that? After two years of playing with somebody, you go through the meritocratic process of a blind audition and all of your colleagues except me and the conductor are like, yeah, I don't want to play with this guy. That's got to hurt. So he took it out on me. Simple as that. Well, then you found out that he and another player who was sympathetic to the DEI worldview, one of them or both had filed a secret HR complaint against you in which they were accusing you of stalking like behavior. that you were not just, quote, racially insensitive, this is the Free Beacon's reporting, but potentially predatory.

1:46:21The narrative was seated behind James Zimmerman's, you're back, beginning with an unofficial HR complaint about which the clarinetist was never notified. And what they allegedly told HR without telling you was that you seemed obsessed with this oboist and his new buddy who's sympathetic to DEI, that you had been asking detailed questions about these two and their living situations. And the oboist alleged, as did the other guy, that you were deliberately driving by their homes. The Free Beacon reporting, it was half true. Zimmerman often drove down the one man street to avoid late afternoon traffic, as did several of his colleagues.

1:47:11So you find out they're trying to paint you as a crazy-ass stalker because you drove down the one guy's street in order to avoid traffic just like half the orchestra? I mean, you're looking at me like this is too ridiculous to be what happened, but that's exactly what happened. The guy moved into my neighborhood. This other player, not the oboist, another DEI, social justice warrior type of violist, a very troubled young man. And I asked him the same question that I ask every new person that's joined the orchestra. hey man welcome to town where'd you move to and he moved right around the corner from me i drove by his house every day before he even lived there and uh he reported me as a stalker for that you think i'm kidding but this is how desperate these people are and when i heard that they so they reported that to management and management didn't even waste my time they they didn't even bring me in for that they said this is so preposterous what these guys are doing to james we know james he's been here for a dozen years he's a star employee we use him for all kinds of media he's a great ambassador for the nashville symphony there's no legs to this thing at all these kids are crazy i'm sure it'll just boil i'm sure it will just go away that's the management style at the nashville symphony if you just ignore something for long enough it's just gonna go away but that is what happened they they said when i drove by this kid's house on the way to work um they claimed i was stalking them so i wrote that email after work after i found that out i was very mad understandably i'd had enough and i was like you know what if management's not going to protect me from this I'm going to quit the orchestra.

1:48:37I was teaching full-time at Vanderbilt at the time. I had plenty of session work. I had other orchestras calling me to come in and play as a guest. I was able to leave the symphony. And I said, I want to quit if you're not going to stand up against these freaks against me. But management fired me before I could quit so they could further their story, this Jussie Smollett-like story that I was some kind of stalker racist who uses the N-word in front of black people. It's all context. Right. So not the oboist, but his other friend who plays the viola had said to you earlier something about his dog.

1:49:11He had mentioned that he was kind of rebuffing, according to the Free Beacon, your efforts to get to know him because he was buddies with the oboist. And when you mentioned his dog, this guy responded, yeah, and he'll fuck anybody up. And you didn't much like that comment. you kind of read this as, wow, this violist is threatening me with his dog. It's like, F me up. And so that leads me to your email. So then you find out this guy who's threatened you with his dog, according to you, and this other guy who you help, but now is playing the race card against you, have filed the secret HR complaint.

1:49:46You're mad. You send an email. And here is the portion of it, in part, that is being used against you. You write, okay, you write an email to the guy who played the viola. And you write, and you CC'd HR. It's not like you were trying to make this secret. But you write, never mind the fact that you originally told me your address was this particular address. So I checked it out on my next commute. And when I described the house to you, you said something to the effect of, oh, I'm actually at a different address. I thought it was odd you'd forgotten your address because who would lie about that?

1:50:18But you're new here, so I let it slide. Also, never mind the fact that at the end of our backstage conversation, when I asked if you have a dog because of the sign on your fence, You affirm that you do. You begin walking toward the door to the locker room and said over your shoulder, he'll fuck anybody up. Cool. Certainly you weren't threatening anybody because who does that? I'm terrified of dogs, he wrote. I have a wife and children. And in my family, we have a firearm. I don't know how to use it, but I'm glad my wife does. It used to belong to her father who is now fighting stage four lung cancer.

1:50:49But I digress. And then you go back to, you know, your email to him and just sort of these two guys hashing this stuff out. And the Free Beacon reports that the next day, well, why don't you tell me what happened? Yeah, I mean, the dog comment was so ridiculous that this kid made that. It was at the lunch table. One day I was waiting in line for lunch, and I said to him, like, yeah, man, that dog you got's huge, or something to that effect. And he's like, yeah, no, fuck anybody up. It was pretty threatening. And, you know, I was getting concerned after they started reporting me as a stalker that they were ready to show up at my house and do some damage.

1:51:26Like, you could, I was just making a judgment call. You could tell these kids were really out of their mind. And people like that at the time are willing to do violence to get rid of white supremacy. So I did not want it to escalate to that point. The whole email that you just quoted from is de-escalatory and copied to HR because I wanted their help in de-escalating this situation. It had been going on for more than a year. Yeah, clearly you weren't trying to hide anything. You cc'd HR on it. Exactly. By the way, who filed the HR complaint? Was it both of them? I'm not sure. Right there. Actually, it was it was the oboe player and another girl that he had kind of co-opted into being his henchwoman who's now gone from the orchestra.

1:52:03She joined another orchestra. But that's a free beacon spoke with a bunch of orchestra members, all of whom said this is ridiculous. James is amazing. James would never stalk anybody. James would never harm anybody. that is absolutely impossible. But notwithstanding that, less than a week later, what did the orchestra do? Well, they put me on probation first because my biggest ally in management, the chief operating orchestra, the chief operating officer, I should say, was out of town. He was on my side of this whole fiasco. And this is the crowning detail of the whole story. They suspended me.

1:52:46and I called my buddy in management and saying, I want to come back. Tomorrow's my mom's 70th birthday. She has tickets to the Beethoven Eroica Symphony. I would like to come back and play. It's her 70th. And he said, no, you can't come back and play. Everyone's afraid of you. We've got these kids in safe houses. We've got armed security in front of the building because they think you're about to murder them. So I said, all right, in that case, if it's getting this bad, I want to quit. So give me a refund for my mom's tickets and I'll be on my merry way. Thank you very much. and he said, okay, I'll get you the refund.

1:53:17So he goes into the ticket system. He looks for tickets under my name. He looks for tickets under my mom's name and cannot find them because my dad bought the tickets for my mom as a birthday present, which leads them to conclude, I made up the story about my mom's 70th birthday. Therefore, I am insane and out of my mind and not to be reasoned with, and they fired me because they can't find tickets in their own system. It sounds like I'm making this up, but this is how ridiculous these people are. They're totally incompetent. And I got hung out to dry. I lost tens of thousands of dollars over this and my entire career and all future prospects because these jackasses can't use their own ticket system.

1:53:54It sounds like I'm making this up, but it's all out there. I have all the receipts from all of this. I mean, I wish I could say it sounds made up, but I've covered so many of these cases where honestly, like the white guy or the white gal gets railroaded because of some DEI obsessed person who is usually white, who's like the most ardent enforcers of this bizarre regime tend to be crazy white liberals who want to make themselves feel better by making you suffer because you don't buy into their same ideology. So now what happened to you? Like, what have you been doing from 2020 to now when you auditioned for the Knoxville Orchestra?

1:54:33so three weeks after this whole thing culminated the pandemic hit so everyone was fired essentially and this whole scenario with me got swept to the back burner and the orchestra spent the entire pandemic trotting out the black oboist as a hero he got all kinds of social justice money he went on all kinds of programs and got all kinds of appointments at universities and boards of directors at conservatories. And he became a superstar on this. I, on the other hand, spent the entire pandemic in this basement learning to write computer software. I learned to code. I went out and did the meme. And now I work in big tech where I've been for the last five years.

1:55:12And when things opened up after the pandemic, I went back to playing sessions. There's quite a few session contractors who wouldn't hire me for a while, but I have one really loyal contractor who believes in me and knows I'm the best player. So on the side of my tech job, I do, you know, I teach a little bit and I play sessions all the time, which is how I've been able to get my playing into the movies and onto Netflix and at Barack Obama's second inauguration. You know, that's my recorded playing everywhere. There's a much better chance, Megan, that you've heard my playing than you have not heard my playing.

1:55:43So that's what I do now. I freelance and I do tech until this last summer when a friend from Knoxville, who I played with, a violinist, he said, hey, man, I don't know if you're looking to get back into the game, but I know your story. I've been following you. It's insane. And we're looking for a principal clarinetist, so you should come out. And I thought, hmm, that's an interesting proposition, because Knoxville is kind of a smaller regional orchestra. I think I could keep my tech job. I wouldn't have to move. Okay, let's see if I can get back on the horse, get back into Olympic shape, because, Megan, you got to practice for these blind auditions, like hours and hours a day.

1:56:21And I've got a nine to five tech job. I've got a wife. I've got three kids. I've got a life. So I'm practicing all night. My kids are going to the bed to the sound of me practicing. They're waking up to the sound of me practicing. All day long on Saturdays, you know, I put all my landscaping projects and other endeavors on the side to practice for this audition. And I showed up and won just to find out that I'm unhirable. So I'm kind of back where I started. I'm doing tech, playing sessions, and talking about how ridiculous the whole orchestra business has become putting meritocracy to the side for DEI.

1:56:55It's just a damn shame. So, and how much was this job going to pay? So, it was going to amount to like a thousand bucks a week, you know, which in my situation... I mean, it's not like you're not going to get rich off of it, but at least you're getting paid for doing what you love. Exactly. It was going to be fun and it was going to be my foot back in the door. And I didn't really think too far beyond what's going to happen if I actually win. I just said, you know, the only thing I can control here going into the competition is get my best playing back because I don't play as much as I used to.

1:57:28When I was the principal clarinet of the Nashville Symphony, I'm playing hours and hours a day. Now I go weeks without practicing sometimes. So I'm sort of out of shape. This is the major leagues. But you tuned up, literally, and got back in shape. And then this happens, and they make no secret of the fact, you say, she said right to you, the woman running the Knoxville Orchestra, that given the past issues at the Nashville Orchestra, she wasn't going to give you the job, even though they'd already told you you were the best. On the blind audition, you won, which is really, I mean, it feels retaliatory.

1:58:02and so you decided this time not to take it lying down and you filed a lawsuit. And by the way, Harmeet Dillon, she is the hero of our show today, this is her second mention, who heads up the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, has already expressed interest in your case because it's illegal to discriminate against white people on the basis of their skin color too. And if this woman is retaliating against you for you exercising your rights back when you were at the other orchestra and saying you don't have the right to fire me just because I have white skin and I'm not going to bend the knee, they could be in some trouble.

1:58:42So that's your theory. What has the Knoxville Orchestra said since you filed your claim? And what are you hoping to get? So, I haven't heard anything from Knoxville yet, but I'm sure their phones have been ringing these last couple of days. I stayed silent after I lost the audition because right after I won the audition and lost the opportunity to get the job I started, you know, talking to my friends that I've made on X and I got a lot of connections because of my Nashville story and I was led to a foundation in Washington, D.C. that takes on cases like this I picked up some local counsel and we're suing on two counts one of them is called Tennessee's Promissory Estoppel Doctrine in which I had reason to believe Estoppel, sorry I'm just a clarinet player.

1:59:26No worries. So they gave me reason to believe that they were going to hire me. I sent my resume. My resume shows that I was gone from the Nashville Symphony since 2020. My story is out there. They could have done some background checks, but they were too lazy to do that. But I had every reason to believe that they knew who I was, and they were willing to hire me if I won the audition. So I'm suing them for the$25 ,000. I picked$25 ,000 for my time spent practicing and a year's salary. So that's what I'm hoping to get in terms of financial compensation. And my second count is that they discriminated against me because of skin color and hired a non-white player who was my runner-up in the audition.

2:00:13Now, that's a big accomplishment. Of all the players except me, he bested them all. But he happens to be non-white. So it's not so obvious whether it was a DEI hire or not, but you can think of these people like Rachel Ford saying, hmm, if we just kick James Zimmerman to the curb, we can get a non-white player in the orchestra and that'll up our diversity numbers since this is all these people apparently care about. it does have a little bit of the stench of DEI on top of it. But how would you like to be this kid who's still in college, he shows up to the audition and all of his colleagues say, hey, congratulations, none of us voted for you at the audition.

2:00:49We all wanted James Zimmerman, but I'm sure you're going to do just fine. And by the way, there's this huge lawsuit about this situation, stinking up the joint. Like, that's a terrible situation to put somebody in. So I really feel for the kid. You know, we clarinetists have somewhat of a brotherhood. So I'm rooting for him to do well and get out of there. I know. How about that? If we're ever in the same city, we should play some duets. I'd love to. I'll play first. You can play the second part. I accept. I accept. I will be the one faking the clarinet movement so that anybody has a shot of thinking your playing is mine.

2:01:23There we go. What we needed here was someone with courage. And this woman who runs the Knoxville Orchestra did not show any courage whatsoever. However, you should be brought back. You should be given the opportunity to do the thing that you're great at and that you love. And this ridiculous incident that was happening right before, but as we built up to George Floyd a Palooza when the nation was suffering from a temporary insanity should not be held against you. That's very clear. And if it has to happen via a lawsuit or a civil rights department investigation, so be it. but it takes guts for you to make a deal out of it, James, because I know no one ever wants to be the squeaky wheel.

2:02:04That's why you kind of go along to get along so that you don't get fired and then you can get the next job. But this can't keep happening. Can't keep happening in general. Can't keep happening to you. We deserve to be able to hear you. The people in Knoxville just got robbed. The people in Nashville got robbed. And I want to leave the audience with this. Someone who goes by violinophile on X retweeted your story. and offered this comment. An important point about this story, I'm not seeing mentioned, is that what James pulled off was a sort of miracle. He had achieved a high-level principal position, rare enough, got canceled, then slugged his way back and won another principal position.

2:02:47It was a real hero's journey. That was, of course, until it was ruined again by another orchestra director who had no spine. I hope it works out for you, James. Thank you so much for coming on and telling your story. It's been great, Megan. Thank you so much. All the best. Wow. Oh, it's just, to me, it's just, it's heart-wrenching to hear these stories. We've talked to so many people to whom this has happened. They drove him nuts by this nonsense man's obsession with race. He sent one email, which wasn't even, that was not threatening. He's saying, hey, you got a nasty dog? We happen to have a gun.

2:03:31He's basically saying, you're threatening to mess with me? Don't. The other guy didn't get fired for the dog comment, right? Like only James. Why? Because the one side, this is how it appears, was supporting DEI, and he wasn't. This is just, it's ridiculous. And honestly, Knoxville, you're the most ridiculous of all that you wouldn't hire him six, seven years after the fact because of this? This woman should have to explain herself. Why? What is it? Is it because you saw somebody who was not white, who was behind James, and that's a much safer hire for you, as he alleges? Where is the orchestra conductor with balls to do what's right?

2:04:15I look forward to finding them because James Zimmerman should not be left on the sidelines. Okay, thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.